Notes Week Ending 4/12

4/6 N1: Riley Greene apparently tried out patience last April and didn’t like it. His beginning this year couldn’t be any more different from his beginning last year. Through 8 games last year, he had drawn 5 walks and was on his way to 23 for March/April, which would place him in a tie for 2nd in the AL. However, he was hitting .138. This year, he hasn’t drawn a walk, and his current OBP of .361 sits below what it would be at the end of last April (.388). However, as you might infer, he is hitting .361, too, and his slugging average is exactly double that (.722). Greene has 13 hits to lead the AL, has 4 doubles (behind only Jonathan Aranda), and 3 big flies.

That phenomenon of having a slugging average twice your batting average — what does it mean? My first interpretation was way off, that you had half your total bases from singles. In fact, Greene has just 6 singles, but 26 total bases. I think what it tells us instead is that your average hit has gone for 2 total bases, or a double. It works here for Greene; he has an average of 2 total bases for each hit, and his slugging average is twice his batting average.

Normally, of course, the combination you would see wouldn’t be .361, .722. Since we’ve had men with higher SAs and lower batting averages (Bonds, Ruth, and McGwire, at least), I guess that could happen, but you’d see it more with .250/.500, or .200/.400. Hornsby had seasons of .403/.756, .401/.722, and .380/.679, but those slant more towards the batting average side than the slugging average side, which is generally what will happen with a very high average. With seasons of .749/.364 (1932), .704/.349 (1938), and .703/.356 (1933), Jimmie Foxx seems to be our man. Foxx was a cross, statistically at least, between Hornsby and peak Bonds/McGwire.

That’s a strange realization, though, isn’t it, that a Jorge Soler in 2023, when he hit 36 home runs and 24 2Bs in 504 AB to post a .512 SA on a .250 batting average, had more total bases per hit than Greene has this year, when Greene’s 3 HRs and 4 2Bs project to totals of 42 and 56, respectively, in that same 504 AB. I guess the lesson is that singles help slugging average while hurting TB/H. Greene leads Soler in Isolated Power (SA-BA) .361 to .262, and that seems to give us a straightforward comparison of the weighted extra base hits, in the same way that the 56/42 vs. 24/36 does. The way that singles help slugging average is just in boosting the hit total and the base.

The last two years Shohei Ohtani has been living comfortably in the .600/.300 range. He slugged .646 on a .310 BA last year; .654 on a .304 BA in 2023. (I suppose I’m taking some liberties there, but even the most lopsided of those ratios doesn’t stray that far from 2.00 if you work it out, although maybe a lesson from that is that this index is slow to move.) For his career, Ohtani has a .574 SA and a .282 BA. But for 10 SA points, it would be a ratio of exactly 2.00. The higher one’s BA, though, the more unlikely that the ratio is double or more the BA, and that is really the point.

Back to Greene and where I thought this would go….he’s not really a high walker. His April of 2024 was an outlier. His top walk mark otherwise in a month is 14 (September of 2022). Last year, his high other than April was 12 walks in June, and that was in 113 PA, so he needed the last walk to even be above 10% walks. He was in the mid 8%s for the whole 2022 and 2023 seasons.

4/6 N2: In their victory against the Diamondbacks Saturday, the Nationals scored 4 runs, but struck out 16 teams, didn’t homer, and drew just 2 walks. Since offensive BAbip is pretty significant, I guess it wouldn’t be as valuable as for pitchers to ignore it, but this made me think it would be fun to play with FIPs versus offenses as a way of looking at those offenses.

My first, quick attempt to get it was a failure. I used “team pitching splits” on Stathead and hoped to split by opponent. But the problem is that “splits” doesn’t seem to provide stats for Fielding Independent Pitching, I would suppose because that needs to be indexed and varies slightly for the context.

4/6 N3: He decided he’d show me. After my exploration a few days ago of Tyler O’Neill’s counts of each kind of hit, on Saturday he had a double and a particularly rare triple, the 4th of his career. Oh does that triple black type on Baseball Reference look good!, O’Neill is doubtless thinking, as he prepares to bat cleanup against Kris Bubic today.

4/6 N4: Is it meritocracy and getting the last out of every roster spot, or dipping into the old-boy network? Regardless, the Padres and Rangers stand out, and there is a parallel to be drawn between them, with the Padres currently having Yuli Gurriel, Martin Maldonado, and Jason Heyward under contract, and the Rangers doling out the salaries of Patrick Corbin and Kevin Pillar.

4/6 N5: Tyler O’Neill’s triples black type honor would have been spoiled if he were still a member of the National League, where Jesse Winker hit 2 triples yesterday. Winker’s first and second triples since 2021. Winker was a batting average qualifier in both 2022 and 2024, so there are some plate appearances going into that, and this is fun. One can rest assured that the Mets fans had a more positive reaction than they would have had if they had seen his triples circa 2021, that is for sure. If they won’t love you, join ‘em (not that Winker initially joined the Mets as a free agent, although he did re-up with them this year).

4/6 N6: Dunns on both sides of the Saturday Reds-Brewers game I had to look up: Blake for the Reds, playing center and scoring twice; Oliver for ther Brewers, playing third and driving in 3 runs. Oliver only stole 37 bases in 286 minor league games, getting thrown out 14 teams, but Statcast does have him with trademark Brewers’ speed: 29.1 ft/sec (92nd percentile) in 2024. 40 strikeouts in 104 PA in the majors last year, and 28.1% during his minor league career.

4/6 N7: I heard that the Athletics have homered in every game this year. And aside from the Yankees’ outlier total, their 14 is the most in the AL. However, Lawrence Butler has yet to join the party.

4/6 N8: LaMont Wade’s unusual slash lines do not usually take the shape of his current .148/.172/.407. With OBPs of .380 and .373 the last two years, walking is normally the name of his game. I’m sure pitchers are going after him, but how much of that this explains, I don’t know. He’s punished them enough in the past to make that seem less than compulsory.

4/6 N9: You know it’s early in the season when you have catchers with 1.100 SLG (Ivan Herrera) and .800 (Logan O’Hoppe) and their 0.5 bWAR doesn’t crack the MLB top 20.

4/6 N10: With Bret Baty wearing a #7 patch on his shoulder to honor the memory of Ed Kranepool, while he himself has jersey #7 on, don’t you think the meaning of the gesture is lost a little bit? I mean, who would really think that that 7 isn’t just a tacky part of the regular uniform? Not that we expect exquisite sensitivity and social sense out of our ballplayers, but wasn’t it a bit of an oblivious choice to take this number this season after giving up his #22 to Soto? Why not take the #7 next season? Yes, I’m being a bit tough, but analyzing the minutiae of number politics does not seem out of keeping when Baty got such a nice car from his supposed mastery of the system. He’s hardly getting an ‘A’ in my course here.

4/6 N11: Actually, on checking, Lou Gehrig provides just as much material as Foxx in terms of finishing seasons with SLG/BA pairs that approximated Riley Greene’s .722/.361, exact 2x pairing, through the end of Saturday. In order of slugging average

Gehrig 1927 .765 .373 (2.05-1)

Gehrig 1930 .721 .379 (1.90-1)

Gehrig 1934 .706 .363 (1.94-1)

Gehrig 1936 .696 .354 (1.97-1)

It’s funny, because LG’s slugging averages rank right with Greene, but in no season did he have more than a double per 10 AB, as Greene has now, and only in 1934 and 1936, when Gehrig connected for the same 49 home runs in 579 AB, did he do better than Greene’s current 1 home run per 12 AB, and then just by the hair of his chinny chin chin (and LG was quite a shaver). So I guess Gehrig’s triples are what explains this, as Greene doesn’t have any yet. Batting average counts in SLG, but as you can see, he and Greene are pretty comparable on that.

Gehrig and Foxx having these similar pairs is really interesting to me and had me asking who was better. Of course, we all assume Gehrig, I guess because he retained his brilliance past 30. It’s not just an academic question, or a 1930s question, as Bill James still had them rated 1-2 among all-time first basemen at the end of the 20th century. The rest of James’ top 10 was McGwire, Bagwell, Murray, Mize, Killebrew, Greenberg, McCovey, and Thomas. James did Negro League players separately, but they came together with the MLB players on his overall list, and he had Buck Leonard in the Murray, Mize, Greenberg, McCovey cluster.

You might ask about Lou’s career SA/BA. He was .632, .340, making for 1.86. The exercise doesn’t apply to career totals (unless we are to include Josh Gibson’s .718/.373), though, because only Ruth, at .690, had a SLG near .722.

4/6 N12: 92.2 IP in 18 games, 17 of them starts. Looks like a pitcher today, right? Not like a greater pitcher mid-career in 1970? But that was Luis Tiant in his only season with the Twins.

He averaged 5 1/3 innings a start, and there’s no trick to that. He only completed 2 games. He didn’t pitch so horribly on average he couldn’t have been kept around (7-3 with a 112 ERA+). My thought was maybe, once one looked into it, he had a few starts of less than 5 innings, but built up to a more normal workload. Looking at the game logs, that also doesn’t fit, and his median start was 5 innings, less than his mean.

I don’t know chapter and verse of Luis Tiant, so upon spying this season in 1970 stats, and that Tiant was 29 at the time, I thought maybe he was a late bloomer with his stardom was yet to come. But instead he was more at that crossroads, like when Clemens had the little aimless period before leaving the Red Sox, sort of. Yes, it was “year of the pitcher,” but Tiant had one of the more unworldly stat lines you will ever see in 1968: a 1.60 E.R.A., a 2.04 FIP (both AL tops), 5.3(!) hits per 9, 264 ks in 258.1 innings. That was his 5th season, and his first four saw ERA+s of 128, 99, 124, and 121. So pitching decently in ‘70, I absolutely would have thought he would have gotten star treatment, not “I don’t trust you” treatment.

I don’t want to make this more mysterious than it was. According to his SABR bio, he was pitching with a hurt shoulder at least for his first 10 starts of the year, before being diagnosed with a cracked bone in that pitching wing. After coming back, he didn’t go more than 7 innings, but maybe he was buiding back up, and mediocre performance (3.52 E.R.A., 1.40 FIP) also made it not particularly tempting to push him farther.

When you go to the game logs for the first 10 games, it’s true that there wasn’t some trick in the length of his starts where they were generally longer than the mean, but, like the end of his season, you generally don’t see a lot of lines that makr you wonder why the hell he was taken out (although my equilibrium is obviously affected by the quick hooks we see these days). He only had three starts where his innings - hits were 2 or greater, and in one of them, he walked 9 Tigers over 5.2 innings.

That game interested me initially because I thought it might provide a clue to a season-long meltdown. But it was something of a one-off, as he only walked as many as 5 in one other start. and his start following the control embarrassment was a 7-inning, 0-walk outing.

Tiant got the win in the 9-walk game, and the most interesting aspect turned out to be what his offense did. Tony Oliva chased Mickey Lolich with a triple in the 5th. Oliva had already singled and homered at that time of the game, but was not able to complete the cycle. Am now always attuned to great Tony Oliva feats.

A piece of trivia. Tiant did get to be a part of that postseason, coming in in the 9th of a game 2 of the ALCS started by Tom Hall. The Twins started the inning down just 4-3, but it was already 7-3 when Luis entered the game. Davey Johnson his a three-run home run off him, and the Orioles completed the sweep the next day, embarrassing the Twins with a 27-10 edge in scoring over the three games.

Looking at his whole career, long outings, it is safe to say, were not Tiant’s forte. His best league ranking in innings was 6th, something that stands out to me, given how great he was, and that that was his AL ranking, not his MLB ranking. Still, he vindicated himself with the Red Sox, completing 23, 25, 18, and 19 games for them in consecutive years, even if that didn’t boost his workload enough to rank with a few guys.

A few odds and ends you might like that I didn’t manage to fit in….Granted, length of start is essential to game scores, and I am rather arguing that that was kept down for Luis in 1970 versus other guys, but other than an 86 he had in a shutout, none of his scores topped 62, which tells you something….He also had a 4.63 FIP on the year, versus a 3.40 E.R.A. He had a 4.83 FIP in 1969, but no other marks higher tha 4.06….The other guys who started for the Twins against the Orioles were Jim Perry in game 1 and Jim Kaat in game 3. Nineteen-year-old Blyleven had come up for the Twins as a starter at the beginning of June, pitching to a 3.18 E.R.A., but like Tiant, got just one relief appearance in that ALCS.

And Happy April 6 Birthday, Bert! (Love the latest Baseball Reference touch).

Finally, I forgot this, and it’s very needed context — the average AL starter that year went 6.29 innings, almost an inning more than Tiant, and we can rest assured he wasn’t pitching any better.

4/7 N1: Both Chicago teams walked 8 batters yesterday, as did the Padres, and the Cardinals, too, in one of the games of their doubleheader. The Dodgers beat everybody, walking 11 against the Phillies. MLB walks are currently 3.57 per 9 innings. It is recurrent that they are higher in April than for the season as a whole, but the current rate is 0.25 higher even than last April. Couldn’t posit a cause offhand.

4/7 N2: Texas is 8-2 despite a .192/.266/.344 team slash. Having allowed 1 more run than they’ve scored, they’ve certainly gotten lucky, but they have pitched and defended well: the slash line against them is .211/.269/.322.

With such a small gap between their OBP and BA, my guess was they’d walked the fewest batters in MLB, but in fact the Phillies have walked 1 fewer, and the Rays have a big lead on everyone, having walked just 16 in 9 games. Yet somehow, the slash the Rays have allowed looks very much like the Rangers’: .210/.264/.318. The Rays have hit 6 batters, only one more than the Rangers, so that doesn’t explain why the non-hit reached base rate for the two teams is so close.

It’s ridiculously early, but if you had to cite two guys for the Rays who have been making batters hit their way on, Shane Baz (didn’t walk anyone in his first start) and Drew Rasmussen (1 walk over his two starts) are probably the guys. Zack Littell being on the staff also doesn’t hurt, but I was trying to make this interesting.

Not only have the Phillies walked the second fewest in MLB, they lead with over 11 strikeouts per game. Yet, the Rays have an even higher SO/BB ratio than the Phillies, ruining my intended factoid.

Like Texas, the Giants are tearing it up, and they have a team 2.85 E.R.A. But in strikeouts, they are thus far the mirror opposite of last year, in a tie for 23rd. Last year, they were 7th. Blake Snell is gone. They hope to get more than the 31 innings they got last year from Robbie Ray, but so far, Ray hasn’t had the strikeout magic. Is 2-0 with a 3.18 E.R.A., but a 7.06 FIP.

4/7 N3: Ironic that Leody Taveras is looking like he might put up a strong stolen base total for the first time, because his sprint speed has gone from 29.7 to 29.3 to 29.1 to 28.5 the last four years. It’s 27.0 so far this year, but that’s obviously too slow to be believed. Playing more games in 2024 than he did in 2023, his “bolts” (30+ ft/sec runs, I think) also decreased, from 43 to 17.

4/7 N4: A couple of interesting/surprising guys in the MLB hitting strikeout pole position tie at 17 strikeouts (excluding Seiya Suzuki’s higher SO total, although he might still be leading even without his two extra games). Despite OPSes of .915 and .953, respectively, Jazz Chisholm and Nathaniel Lowe both have 2 BB and 17 SO. The fact that Chisholm gets hurt as much as he does may have obscured that he’s a very high strikeout guy, if not quite in the class of some others. But a 200+ total, if he is to stay healthy, is not out of the question.

From having rated first basemen on the stat in a note about Pete Alonso, I know Lowe has a good OBP historically (.355 career). He also doesn’t really have strikeout troubles, and is coming off a career-best 1.76-1 SO/BB ratio. The MLB ratio a year ago was a full ratio point higher than that, 2.76-1.

Lowe’s has already had three 3-SO games so far this year. No single pitcher, though, has gotten him 3 times. Since he’s gone 5 for 11 with a home run over innings 7-9, however, his problem hasn’t been hitting relievers, as that fact might suggest. He’s actually struck out in 8 of his 11 plate appearances over the first 3 innings.

4/8 N1: The Marlins have a rookie named Liam Hicks. Could he really be John Hicks, playing under an alias? Or at least do the gods really want to confuse us?

Two of John’s three major league teams were the Tigers and Rangers. L. Hicks was taken Rule 5 from the Tigers, and was drafted by the Rangers.

Liam has heretofore only been a catcher with the Marlins, but started 73% of his minor league games at first base. John’s major league division of starts was 103 at catcher, 101 at first base.

Size, however, presents a challenge to the idea that they are one and the same man: John was listed at 6’2”, 230 lb. in his playing days, while Liam is 5’9”, 185 lb.

John was active in MLB from 2015-2021, to save you the trouble of looking it up, and to assure you I am not dredging up another 1970s favorite of mine.

4/8 N2: If you saw the MLB Network Quick Pitch recap of the Pirates/Cardinals game, you would have gotten very much the wrong idea of Thomas Harrington’s day. QuickPitch cut it so that Harrington is getting the save, and striking out 3 in the 9th. That is all true, but misleading. It was really the end of a 4-inning outing, so he does not seem to be being converted into a closer. And 5 ks in 4 innings, which was his total tally, gives a different impression from the 3-strikeout, 1-inning outing that was suggested. The 5 k/4 inning outing looks perhaps equally impressive, but you realize that he only had 2 strikeouts over his first 3 innings, so isn’t really projecting as a closer.

4/8 N3: It is two strikes against the Yankees in my book, since it is thanks to them that “sweeper” entered the lexicon, and torpedo bats entered the world.

4/8 N4: Josh Naylor currently has 3 steals and no home runs. At what time in the season will it be the point to panic, if his home runs haven’t caught his steals, in terms of who this guy is?

On another front, his exact .300 average so far could be seen as playing over his head. But Naylor actually is a low strikeout guy and hit .308 in 2023 in 495 plate appearances. He fell to .243 last year, but with a .246 BAbip.

4/8 N5: Since Josh Naylor has had OPSes versus lefties of .715 and .821 the last two years after back-to-back .512s in 2022 and 2021, Matt Wallner and Kerry Carpenter will be calling him in as a witness in their bid to transcend platoon duty.

4/8 N6: Logan Gilbert’s start so far is just reducing those Cy Young odds.

4/8 N7: You have to love how Jose Altuve strikes out 5 times in a game last week and bounces back by going 6 for 14 over his next three outings with 2 home runs. I admire his mental toughness. The throwing woes show some demons, but he never succumbs to them.

4/8 N8: Watching Derek Hill on televison make a beautiful and spectacular outfield catch against the Mets today got me thinking about the one catch that stands out to me as the best among games I’ve seen in person. It was a catch that Yasiel Puig made against the Mets on 5/22/14. And that got me thinking about Puig more generally, and how he was a fleeting star, sort of a variation on “Linsanity.” Puig stirred the imagination that he could be an all-time great, but in what seemed like the blink of an eye, he wasn’t even good enough to play. I put no limit on what he could do. I made pronouncements that make me blush when I recall them, that endanger my credibility. The guy I did that with in another sport, in what some would say was the heat of the moment, was Colin Kaepernick during his period of brief explosive greatness with the 49ers.

Ultimately, with Puig, I guess it was too many injuries and not enough power that did him in as much as anything else, but I have to say that he had a gift for making stupid plays. You couldn’t believe he did the stupid stuff he did, and you thought he must have been doing it to spite the world at large, that he just didn’t care about playing sound baseball and was flouting norms. In short, it was simply infuriating. But the truth is that people who have a learning disbility or true uncontrolled stupidity or whatever one wants to call it really can’t do the simple things that other people take for granted. And that may have been the case with Puig, instead of revealing a selfishness and disregard for others’ anger.

Curently, Puig is with the Kiwoom Heroes in the KBO. He has been playing left field and probably playing DH as well. Hitting .269 with 3 home runs through the team’s first 13 games, he leads the Heroes in plate appearances, runs, and hit by pitches, and those 3 home runs tie him for the team lead. The team is hitting higher than he is, .270, but he is over the league mark of .254. From that, you might think the Heroes are a good team, but so far, they are not (5-8). They also finished 28 games under .500 and last of 10 teams a year ago.

I had thought that Puig was new to the Heroes and the KBO, but in fact, he is making a return to the team. His production so far has been quite like what he did for all of 2022, when he hit .277 with 30 doubles, 21 home runs, and 58 walks in 126 games. I have seen other American players not burn bridges in foreign leagues and play in non-consecutive years.

Not sure what is going on with KBO offense so far this year and that .254 average; the league hit .277 last year! The four years before 2024, the averages were .263, .260, .260, and .273. Just when you think you have the rate figured out, there’s another moment on the roller coaster.

The typically terrible Hanwha Eagles are hitting .169 so far this year. Chi Hong An, who has compiled 1831 hits and 153 home runs over his KBO career, is off to a 2 for 30 start, but otherwise, among regulars, the worst average on the team belongs to Estevan Florial. He is hitting .128 in 47 AB and has not homered.

Florial appeared in 36 games for the Guardians just last year. As a 20-year-old, MLB, Baseball America, and Baseball Prospectus all had him as one of the top 50 prospects in the game. He’s now 27.

4/8 N9: Jose Abreu in 2010-11 Cuban National Series 50 (CNS) league: in 293 plate appearances, a slash line of .453/.597/.986. I don’t know if they were boys, but he was a man. A 23-year-old one at that.

4/8 N10: In MLB, Jose Abreu got hit by more than his share of pitches. 125 in all, or 14 per 162 games. But his Cuban HBP numbers are absolutely wild. Over 10 years, he was hit almost once per every 4 games (189 times in 772 games). In a season that usually ran 90 games, he had back-to-back 30 hit seasons.

Easy to wonder if some of these were intentional, as dominant as he was. Also funny to think that he got hit by so many pitches, yet was such an iron man. In Cuba, too, he doesn’t seem to have had many injuries that kept him out of the lineup.

4/9 N1: I’ll take my chances with a high strikeout, high walk player, and Detroit’s Justyn-Henry Malloy definitely will qualify on both counts. But you prefer when his ratio between the elements is the 1.40 it was during his minor league career, and not the 3.70 it was in his 230 plate appearance rookie 2024.

This year so far, Malloy has been ridiculous, producing very few hit balls while batting primarily in the leadoff slot. He has a walk rate of 26.7%, a strikeout rate of 30% from his 30 plate appearances. So, combining the two, the majority of his plate appearances have ended with non-contact.

Obviously 26.7% walks is unsustainable on the face of it, but the Statcast Zone % to Malloy shows that pitchers have been helping him out. It sits at 45.4%; among MLB regulars last year, only Bryce Harper saw a lower percentage of strikes. Give Malloy credit for not swinging and working on his walks, but it is easier not to swing when the men on the mound aren’t throwing you strikes. Malloy is swinging 38.5% so far this year; among 2024 regulars, Juan Soto and Jonathan India swung less often than that, but no one else did.

If Malloy is to emerge as a regular, it will probably happen because he becomes a veritable home run hitter. He is only on the fringes of that. His best minor league home run season was 23 (in 136 games), and Baseball America gave him a ‘50’ power grade before last year.

4/9 N2: The 10 runs allowed on Tuesday by Sale and Wheeler, 1-2 in the 2024 NL Cy Young, certainly a disappointment to general baseball fans. But Braves fans probably welcome 7 runs scored like farmers greet rain after a drought, no matter the circumstances.

4/9 N3: Jacob Wilson just feeding expectations that he can be another Luis Arraez at the plate with his .400 start.

4/9 N4: I would need to think about this some to have any chance of even a semi-coherent take, and I don’t really have an appetite for the discussion, but a little browsing I did tonight to address a question about what is normative for ERA+ perhaps shows that there are issues combining Negro League data and MLB data on leaderboards, specifically when they are rate stats.

You might enjoy the whole research context, so I’ll share it. I was reading about Billy Pierce’s role with the ‘62 Giants. I didn’t even realize he’d been with the Giants, so I looked him up, focusing on that part of his career. Seeing that he finished 3rd in the Cy Young despite being just 16-6 with a 3.49 E.R.A., I was intrigued.

I was less so when I remembered that the only votes were for 1st, so somebody could technically be noted in Baseball Reference with a high finish just because most of the voting centered on one guy, and then anyone else getting votes was by definition an outlier. In this case, the consensus was Drysdale, and if you weren’t going to vote for him, you were liable to vote for anyone. One person apparently saw Pierce as a Kevin Costner type from “For Love of the Game,” felt inspired and creative, and ran with it.

Pirece hadn’t been much better than average by ERA+ at 110. But noting that Drysdale had only had a 128 ERA+ and the runner-up, Pierce’s teammate Jack Sanford, a 112, I became interested in what options the voters had had in all, and also realized I really didn’t have a good sense of variation in ERA+. Maybe Drysdale’s 128 was better than I realized. I understood that a lot of what was going on was probably E.R.A. and ballpark being ignored for wins, particularly since Drysdale won 25 and Sanford 24, but I am generally looking for excuses to rummage around, and I had found a couple.

1962 NL pitching did seem very flat. In a league with a 3.94 E.R.A., Koufax led everybody rather easily at 2.54, but because of Dodger Stadium, didn’t come in first in ERA+. That was Gibson at 151, but with a 2.85 E.R.A. Affirming the talent of the infamous Ernie Broglio, of course with the Cardinals then, he was 2nd at 144. Behind Koufax, nine pitchers in the league had E.R.A.s from 2.80 to 3.07 (Drysdale was 2.83, and Pierce 3.49).

This seemed to me a funky season, and I got big eyes, I guess, thinking it could be the basis for a note — both Pierce getting that vote, and the worst top pitching performances in a season, or something. But before describing the terrain or making a case, I needed to know what was truly normative at the the top of ERA+.

On its leaders page, Baseball Reference has something I like, “Year-by-Year-Top 10s.” I called this up for Adjusted ERA.

Any hopes that this would reveal anything dramatic about 1962 were disappointed. Looking at it again, it does seem like top ERA+s from maybe ‘60-’62, or ‘57-’62, were lower than normal. From a trivia standpoint, unfortunately, the lists only reflect MLB. Hank Aguirre posted a 185 ERA+ in ‘62 for Detroit, an example of the difficulty of wading through another league. Then these kind of year-to-year comparisons of the numbers needs to take into account expansion. The extra teams of ‘62 were bound to result in a leaderboard that was harder to crack eventually, and probably had the higher numbers to reflect that.

Easing back in time, I noticed a sudden difference in the numbers between 1949 and 1948. In 1948, the #10 guy, Gene Bearden (ironically a MLBer) had a 168, while in 1949, Mike Garcia was #1 with 170.

Why did things change so that the level that only got you about #10 in 1948 got you #1 in 1949? The end of the Negro Leagues, of course. The preceding yearly lists are probably at least 80% Negro League, and the numbers are higher. 1940-1947 saw eight Negro League seasons with indices of 300 or greater. More power to Gene Richards and Robert Keyes in those big seasons, but they only pitched 27 and 28 innings, respectively.

A very quick look at OPS+ seemed to suggest that the issue is there with hitters, too, and maybe is as extreme. These leaderboards have been made into Negro League leaderboards, and anyone wanting to use them for quick reference for MLB is basically out of luck.

Solutions on Baseball Reference’s end seem rather simple. Expanding the leaderboards beyond 10 guys seems the worst of the better options, because it is possible they would have to be expanded greatly and impractically to get many MLBers on them. They wouldn’t be easy to look at at that length. Listing the league of the player has probably been long overdue and would be helpful even for my American League versus National League question. Finally, I doubt it would be hard at all for Baseball Reference to make available the historical top 10s exclusively within the smaller, subset leagues.

I think what annoys me is that Baseball Reference doesn’t seem to have thought that anyone could be using these lists as a research tool. It’s more like they think everyone is just excited to look at leaders and crown the best players. If that is one’s goal, given the historical oversights, I can certainly see how one would want to err on the side of honoring Negro Leaguers. A top 10 is a top 10, and it wasn’t the fault of the Negro Leaguers that they didn’t play more games per season, or that more data wasn’t kept. We establish the minimum requirements, they have the best numbers, and the lists just reflect that.

A broader point is that using different sample size requirements for single-season records depending on leagues seems to make things less workable than having different standards for career rate records, not that there aren’t things to think about there as well. The Negro Leaguers should be recognized, but the data are just not comparable, and I don’t think it is enlightening to see it theoretically lumped together, and in practice mostly representing the Negro Leagues. But in general, as I said, I think we get into trouble when we think of statistical records, such as the all-time best, and forget about mere records, as in what the data are for individual players.

4/10 N1: Hey, after the shoutout, and my hope that they would follow in Josh Naylor’s footsteps, a home run against a lefty for both Kerry Carpenter and Matt Wallner over the last couple of days. Not that the home run was enough to get Carpenter in the lineup against Fried on Wednesday.

4/10 N2: I have no reason to wish professional difficulty on the Contrerases, but I must say it has kept things simple that they’ve both been woeful so far. Their batting averages added together are .256.

Willson, however, already with a bWAR of -0.9, has been on a different level from William. He’s failed to hit a home run while William has a couple, and has 2 walks to William’s 8. Since he’s never had more than 138 strikeouts in a season and has a rate of 24.3% for his career, his MLB-leading 22 strikeouts are a shocker. Coming off slugging averages of .468, .467, and .466 (in fact, his number last year made a streak of four straight increases), he hasn’t shown his age at the plate before this season, but he will be 33 in May.

4/10 N3: It would be interesting if we could get team records if earned runs were used instead of actual runs. How much shift would there be in the standings? A bit more, I guess, now that we have the ghost runner. But if the refiguring never changed a team’s record by more than 3 games, let’s say, that would ne interesting. Ties would certainly creep in with this methodology, too, since no one is holding up the decision of any games on account of earned run ties.

4/10 N4: /The list of players with the most PA who haven’t walked: #1 Jackson Chourio, 55. #2 Jacob Wilson, 48. #3 Victor Robles, 46.

Chourio leads the NL in RBI and is tied for the MLB lead in extra-base hits, so most is good there. How bWAR only has him 0.1 ahead of the struggling Jazz Chisholm, though, has me scrambling.

/The list of players with the most PA with just 1 BB: #1 Riley Greene, 50. #2 Christian Encarnacion-Strand, 49. #3 Lourdes Gurriel, 48.

/The list of pitches with the most batters faced and no walks. #1 Kyle Freeland, 76. #2 Joe Ryan, 64. #3 Matthew Liberatore, 49.

Ryan has hit 4 batters already, which not surprisingly gives him black type. That race between his hit batters and his walks reminds me of the one I’ve manufactured between Josh Naylor’s steals and his home runs.

/The list of pitchers with the most batters faced and just 1 walk on the season.

#1 Nick Lodolo, 71. #2 Zach Eflin, 68. #3 Chris Sale, 66.

Lodolo only has 8 strikeouts, too, so seems to be reinventing himself. That’s over 18.2 innings. He came up in 2022, and his previous MLB seasons have seen him strike out 11.4 (2022), 12.3, and 9.5 per 9 innings. It doesn’t seem to be a matter that he is keeping the ball down while he didn’t before; over the same seasons, including 2025, his GB/FB ratios have been 1.35, 1.24, 1.25, and 1.26, respectively.

4/10 N5: Phew. Can’t pronounce Pete Crow-Armstrong a complete disappointment thus far when he is predictably leading outfielders in Outs Above Average. Rather, for better and for worse, looks much the same guy as a year ago, except he hasn’t gone yard yet.

4/10 N6: Eugenio Suarez was one of the stories of baseball’s first week, but has since gone on vacation. 0 for his last 23.

4/10 N7: I’m sorry, but the Mariners having two Luis Castillos starting for them absolutely should be leading SportsCenter. Who cares if Ashton Jeanty will last until pick 12 for the Cowboys?

4/10 N8: There currently are eight major league teams hitting under .210. The Reds, at .206 as a team, don’t have anyone hitting over .273, regardless of his number of at-bats.

4/10 N9: Kyren Paris with his 1.653 OPS seems the surprise of the season so far. You don’t see many Baseball America “30” hit tools in the Prospect Handbook. The #20 Angels’ prospect before the season, he seems to have been rated at all because of a “strong righthand swing”, being “athletic”, and being a “plus runner.” It probably also helped that the Angels are weak in prospects. Paris played 15 games with the team in 2023 at age 21, so that certainly shows something. His career minor league batting average was .236, and his slugging average .390. This early-season performance continues his trajectory from the spring, when he hit .400 with 6 doubles and 4 steals in 45 at-bats.

4/10 N10: Time to pick on Alec Bohm after Wednesday’s 4-strikeout game. He has a .044 Secondary Average, worst in the National League among qualifiers, and isbehind only Alejandro Kirk in MLB. One double and one walk are his only non-singles that enter the equation. That “Sabermetic Baseball Reference Batting Page” shows he has a lowly 1 run created. He actually has 3 runs scored, and 3 RBI.

4/10 N11: 8 more hits allowed for Antonio Senzatela over 4 and a third, but this time his luck didn’t hold, as he gave up 8 earned runs, too, and set the Brewers off on their merry way to 17 runs. Senzatela now is off by himself, having allowed 27 hits, although relief could be in sight, as Patrick Corbin saw his first action on Tuesday. It was quite an odd start, as the 8 hits came despite three 1-2-3 innings.

The Brewers left just 2 on base in the game. They went 8 for 14 with RISP.

4/10 N12: Octavio Dotel had a special arm. I was trying to be something of a casual fan when he came up to the Mets in 1999, but he made a huge impression on me, and I developed the baseball crush on him that you do. I grew up on pitchers with rising fastballs like Gooden, Sid Fernandez, and Cone. Dotel was this little guy who had one and made you dream. He became a reliever who finished with 10.8 ks per 9, but he started his first 14 games.

It’s always a questionable prospect, but I would venture to say the 5.35 E.R.A. he posted in those games was misleading. (For what it’s worth, he had a 7-2 record.) In those 14 starts, there were six when he went 7 or 8 and allowed just 1 run. In three of them, he struck out 9 or 10.

He also had a game against the Padres where he carried a no-hitter into the 7th. Phil Nevin followed up walks to Gwynn and John Van Der Wal with a home run to break up the early bid, but Dotel recovered to get the next three guys, ending the inning with his 9th strikeout.

I was living in the Chicago area at the time, but I must have seen part or all of some of these games, and somewhere in there he hooked me.

4/11 N1: Among the major league firsts for Zac Veen yesterday was his first caught stealing. Ironically, that may be the strongest part of his minor league offensive record; over 2022-2024, he was an 87% base stealer, and plenty active, too, with 67 steals per 162 games. However, since he missed substantial time in 2023 and 2024, much of that success came in the A+ Northwest League in 2022, where he stole 50 bases, 10 more than anyone else in the league. Baseball America says he only has average speed, but timed speed limitations have never stopped Ronald Acuna.

Veen’s record of hitting for average in the minors is really a record of not doing that (.258 2024; .209 2023; .245 2022), but Baseball America seems to think he might do much better (‘55’ hit grade) if he comes to terms with his lack of natural power.

Certainly, overall, his status as a prospect seems to have something to do with having been a first-round draft pick, back in the day.

4/11 N2: Might not be wise for the Cubs to keep giving Ryan Pressly save opportunities, or at least high-leverage work, considering his 6 walks and 2 strikeouts in 7 innings so far. Their other pitcher to get a save, Colin Rea, has just 2 strikeouts in 5.1 innings.

4/11 N3: The Cubs have motored right past the Pirates in steals, and also have just 1 CS on the year. PCA and Nico Hoerner have given them 6 steals each, and Jon Berti has accounted for 5.

4/11 N4: With 4 steals on the year, helping Boston’s overall 19 for 21 effort, Trevor Story certainly isn’t playing it safe, despite his history of injuries and being 32. Story has never stolen more than 27 in a season, but there is reason to think he can at least match that this year. First, that came in 2018, before the current rules, and was good for 6th in the NL. Second, in 2020, he actuaally led the NL in steals, but it was the 60-game season, so his total only reached 15. With the new rules, over 2023-2024, he’s stolen 16 bases in 169 games, or 38 per 162 games.

His percentage was poor last year, though, as he was caught 3 times in 9 attempts. Statcast does say he is not as fast as he was in 2018, having lost a good foot per second (which is a lot).

4/11 N5: It’s kind of depressing that your wildest hope with Michael Harris is only that he can get back to the form he had in 2022, as a 21-year-old. Not that many players start with an .853 OPS and turn out to be a lot better than that. That’s why regression-to-the-mean occurs; to an extent, there is little room to do anything but go down. But regression to the mean has certainly proved the better predictor after his Rookie of the Year campaign than Harris’s youth. There is more to his record than the seasonal decline indicates, certainly, and I remain a fan, but it’s hard to stay patient.

4/11 N6: Neither Tarik Skubal nor Chris Sale, the Cy Young award winners in 2024 and first and second in MLB strikeouts, is in the top 15 in either strikeouts or strikeouts-per-inning this year. Am aware that even any mild Skubal bashing seems off key after he threw 6 shutout innings against the Yankees in his last start.

Before the year, a case could be made that Paul Skenes and Garrett Crochet were the favorites to top their respective league in strikeouts. Skenes struck out 11.5 per 9, made just 23 2024 starts, and has a goal to pitch a throwback number of innings this year; Crochet was on an innings program last year, but still ended up 7th in MLB in strikeouts, and struck out a fantastic 12.9 per 9. At this point in the young season, though, Skenes is only tied for 15th in MLB in strikeouts, and he’s 26th in strikeouts-per-9, while Crochet is outside of the top 25 in both categories.

The veterans Wheeler and Logan look like they might be just as good bets to lead in strikeouts. Cole Ragans (5th in SO, 1st in ks per 9), far less hyped than Crochet but just a tad older and more experienced as a starter, also may not cede the point.

The one thing that is great is that the 11 pitchers who struck out 200 or more last year have combined to make 33 starts this year. In other words, they haven’t missed a start! Surely we haven’t been spelling gloom and doom on the pitcher durability front unnecessarily, so whether this is just a rare sunny day (not Sonny Grey and his 203 ks last year), or some indication that strikeout total indicates durability, is an interesting question. But let’s at least appreciate that none of these guys broke down in the spring, and none have broken down in the early games. (Yikes, look what I’m tempting.)

4/11 N7: Are there still Kyle Schwarber critics? If there are, it seems his performance answers them just about every day. Schwarber has me thinking of Bill James’ formula to determine the “World’s Best Hitter,” or “Hitter Rankings,” which is sort of a mix of a guy’s recent track record and his very recent track record, so that Schwarber’s current 1.150 OPS this year would get special weight. But my point is that Schwarber seems to just keep on keeping on, not letting being in his 30s catch up to him, and has endured more than guys who had similar value a few seasons ago. I’d like to see the track of where Kyle has been on James’ ranking over times.

At the conclusion of the 2022 season, in the James Handbook, Schwarber actually didn’t rate badly at all, 20th. That was a year when he hit .218 with 46 home runs and 86 walks, with a 10 home run, .366 OBP September.

Overall, if you look at that top 20, I think you’d have to say that if you can hit you can hit. Hitters endure pretty well, certainly compared to pitchers.

It was #1 Judge, #2 Goldschmidt, #3 Trout, #4 Freeman, #5 Y. Alvarez, #6 Betts, #7 Alonso, #8 Altuve, #9 Manny Machado, #10 Jose Ramirez, #11 Springer, #12 Harper, #13 Trea Turner, #14 Soto, #15 Tatis, #16 Lindor, #17 Arenado, #18 Semien, #19 Julio Rodriguez, #20 Schwarber.

Alonso 7th and Soto 14th is certainly a surprise. The Marlins just intentionally walked Soto with runners on 1st and 3rd in the 6th inning and 1 out to get to Alonso! Soto can be treated in the freakish category that should be reserved for Judge and Bonds. This 14th rating could be a quirk of that time and this system, but might also be a good reminder that Soto is human.

Postscript….Soto’s monthly 2022 rankings, as presented in that book: 2nd, 2nd, 9th, 13th, 11th, 10th, 14th. 2022 was the year he went from the Nats to the Padres and never really hit, with a .246 average for Washington, and then .236 for San Diego.

4/12 N1: Yankees rain-filled disaster Friday night, in which all five of their pitchers issued a walk in a game called in the 6th, increased their walks-per-9 on the season from 3.39 (better than MLB average) to 4.70, now the MLB worst. They walked 11 in all.

I think this shows that outliers are much more possible for “high stats.” We talk about ceilings and floors, but there is no ceiling for walks in a game. Conversely, there is a floor.

Let’s take something like hits. The Yankees didn’t get much going against Robbie Ray and Spencer Bivens, going 2 for 17 (a .118 average). That only dropped their season average 5 points, from .265 to .260. If they’d been no hit, it would have just dropped their average 10 points, or two slots in the standings for highest batting average in MLB.

Regarding the walks, I suppose everything is evening out, as this is the team that hit 9 home runs against the Brewers, seeming to defy any assumed ceilings. For the analogy to completely hold, however, that would have had to have happened in a wind storm, or against a tanking team, or against position player pitchers, or something of that sort. You all jump to the torpedo bats, but torpedo bats may be here to stay.

NOTE: I’ll leave this up, because perhaps there are things of merit in it, but I made a colossal goof in the calculations. The Yankees true staff walk rate before the Giants game was 4.02, not 3.39. So that should affect our understanding of what one such game so early in the season can do, and the true rating of their staff control before it.

4/12 N2: O.k., it’s not just my impression. The Marlins have no business being 6-7. They have scored 3.6 runs a game, and given up 4.7. Seems there’s a pall over the franchise, and none of that “hey, we’re better than expected” vibe that might go along with that record.

4/12 N3: Bonus points if you noticed the curious absence of Rafael Devers from the top 20 James hitters at the end of 2022. Devers posted a .296/.358/.521 line in 614 PA, but ranked 22nd. He was #9 in the world as of August 1, but had a .713 OPS second half. So the system certainly is sensitive to recent form. That’s fine; differentiates it from other systems, which God knows, tend to be similar enough to one another.

By the way, if I showed you Devers’s yearly slugging averages and Soto’s, I’m not sure you could pick out who was who. If you’re a big fan with a baseball card bent, you probably could, because of Soto’s .695 in 2020, but it’s not really clear that Soto is any higher in general with his data points. Since Juan’s rookie year in 2019, Devers has finished the year with a better slugging average than he’s had three times in six years.

Soto does, for his career, have a reverse home/road hitting split. In road slugging average, he leads Raffy .554 to .497.

Ohtani was another big name outside the top 20 in 2022, coming in 27th. I think some of his sporadic playing time early in his career factored into that, as he started the year 46th. On the season, his 2022 numbers were much like Devers’: .273/.356/.519, in 666 PA.

#s 21-30 seems to have aged at least as well as #s 1-20. That group was Guerrero Jr., Devers, Bregman, Olson, Starling Marte, Nimmo, Ohtani, Bichette, Teoscar Hernandez, Arozarena. Kyle Tucker #31….

Five current Mets in that top 30, although I think all but Soto were with the team at the time. The Mets did win 101 games that year, but hardly had a brilliant offensive season, just tying for 5th in MLB in runs scored. Their OPS was 54 points better after the All-Star break than before, although their 0.16 increase in runs per game seems less notable.

4/12 N4: Unlike the 6-7 Marlins, I have found the 6-7 Cardinals surprisingly watchable this year, although Jordan Walker isn’t looking like much ballplayer. He is in the black in bWAR, though, at 0.2, which rather surprises me. Important for his career that his defense develops, and according to Defensive Runs Saved, it may be getting out of that “work in progress” stage; he’s at +2.

4/12 N5: Not a good night for the Rockies against the Padres Friday. They strike out 15 times (including 4 from Zac Veen), and Kyle Farmer gets their only hits.

4/12 N6: Jose Quintana was quite the nibbler last year, ranking dead last among MLB qualifiers in strike percentage (59.5%). Friday, he was at it again, succeeding his way. No runs in 7 innings, and just 80 pitches, but just 62.5% strikes, including just 10 of 22 first-pitch strikes.

This combination of a low pitch count and a lowish strike rate may not be as unusual as you or I would think; on Thursday, the Angels’ Jose Soriano threw just 93 pitches over 7.2 innings, but recorded just 59.1% strikes.

Maybe it’s a Jose thing (not that anyone would confuse their fastball velocity).